An intimate portrait of a bittersweet father-daughter relationship.
A young journalist’s memoir chronicles her trek in search of clues to her father’s hidden life and their much-too-short relationship.
When she was 11, Loustalot’s father died from AIDS. When she was 8, her father regaled her with whimsical talk of the round-the-world trip they would take together. However, he was already infected with HIV, and the journey never became a reality. Fifteen years later, Loustalot embarked on the excursion they had planned together. “Our relationship was still alive,” she writes. “I felt trapped beneath it and all the unnatural questions he left behind. I needed to be set free. I needed to say goodbye.” Angkor Wat in Cambodia, a place her father had mentioned, became the author’s starting point; she believed that “in the far-flung places he had wanted to visit with me were the answers to him…[and] some of the answers to myself.” On her journey, Loustalot also traveled to Stockholm, where her father was a student, and her last stop was Paris, a city that meant so much to her as a little girl: “It was going to be my father’s gift to me. But how do you accept a gift from someone who isn’t here to give it to you?” Sandwiched between travel chapters, the author chronicles life in Sacramento with her mother, her father’s separate life in Santa Cruz with his lover, and, finally, her father’s decline and death. “Who or what would my father have been like if he had grown up in a community and a larger society where being gay wasn’t a bad thing?” she asks. Though she didn’t necessarily find definitive answers, her adventure makes for compelling reading.
An intimate portrait of a bittersweet father-daughter relationship.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00520-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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